


On Egyptian Rivers of Some Renown

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 18:23:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: Dirk Gently was not cute.Dirk Gently was a goddamn menace, traipsing around in his seemingly endless array of technicolor jackets with his neat side part, twee exuberance shining out through his wide eyes like a guiding beacon, summoning all the bizarre terrors of the world to his person. There was probably something poetic in there about the gravitational pull of weirdness, but Todd didn’t write sad songs about strange people anymore and even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be writing one about Dirk Gently. Who was not, for the record, cute.





	On Egyptian Rivers of Some Renown

**Author's Note:**

> AKA ‘In which Amanda gives her brother the shit he deserves about his thoroughly unsubtle boner for Dirk Gently.’
> 
> Still clearing out my GDocs slowly but surely! I have quite a few silly oneshots therein I’ve been meaning to see through for awhile now and this goofy sibling interaction was speaking to me today.
> 
> Enjoy!

The first thing that Todd said when Amanda picked up was, "I think I won the lottery."  
  
Across the line, tinny and distant, his sister snorted.  
  
"He's cute and all," she replied, with the curl to her words that meant she was trying not to laugh, "but let's not get carried away."  
  
Admittedly, Todd had had an exciting few days. He'd witnessed his car beaten to scrap metal in front of his face, hallucinated himself in a hotel hallway, stumbled onto the scene of a particularly grisly murder - in which he was now a Person of Interest according to the deeply unfriendly detectives leading the investigation. He’d lost his job, rescued a dog, had nearly all of his belongings destroyed by a gang of bat-toting weirdos, watched his cokehead landlord shoot himself, accidentally implicated his involvement in a kidnapping case to the aforementioned suspicious detectives, and fallen into the orbit of the most singularly strange individual he had ever had the displeasure of meeting in his entire life.  
  
Nor had he had an abundance of sleep during the whole mess, stress and trauma being what they were. With all of that in mind, standing on a darkened street corner a few blocks from the police precinct with a dirty slip of paper presumably worth ten thousand dollars clutched in his fist, he thought he could be forgiven for not leaping to the obvious conclusion.  
  
"What?" He asked, confused, scrunching his nose up in the way that Amanda always said made him look like a constipated rabbit. "What are you talking about? Who's cute?"  
  
"The guy who's not your friend," Amanda explained slowly, as though it ought to be obvious. "Tall, excitable, adorable? If you like them foreign and WASPy, anyway."  
  
"Why would you say that?" Todd demanded, horror dawning through the slowly cresting brilliance of the adrenaline rush that apparently came along with winning the actual, literal lottery. The small, sordid detail that he’d stolen the ticket from an active crime scene didn’t do much to dull the shine.

"Well it's either that or he does a hell of an English accent," Amanda said thoughtfully. "Very committed to the character."

“Not - ” Todd snapped, and then sighed, reaching up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. Too late he remembered the blood-spattered lottery ticket in his fist, now irreparably crumpled, not that anyone would likely notice beyond the crimson staining its corners. “I know he’s _English_ , I’m not an idiot - ”

“You sure about that?”

“ - I meant _cute._ Why would you say he’s _cute?_ ” Todd pressed, bowling over Amanda’s fondly sniping aside as if he hadn’t heard it. They’d said worse to each other in the course of their genetically aligned existence, and honestly he was more offended by the assessment of the world’s most irritating holistic detective - whatever the fuck that even meant - as ‘cute’ than he was at the deserved implication of his idiocy.  
  
Dirk Gently was not cute.

Dirk Gently was a goddamn menace, traipsing around in his seemingly endless array of technicolor jackets with his neat side part, twee exuberance shining out through his wide eyes like a guiding beacon, summoning all the bizarre terrors of the world to his person. There was probably something poetic in there about the gravitational pull of weirdness, but Todd didn’t write sad songs about strange people anymore and even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be writing one about Dirk Gently. Who was not, for the record, cute.

“I don’t know, because he is?” Amanda said dispassionately. There was the distant, gentle buzz of her snare - a sloppy, probably one-handed roll that Amanda likely wasn’t even aware she was doing - and the susurrous shift of her customary black hoodie shuffling as she hefted a lazy shrug. “He has that like, twinky thing going for him. Like a sexy baby deer or some shit.”

“Baby deer?” Todd echoed, aghast.

“ _Sexy_ baby deer,” Amanda corrected.

 _“Twink?”_ Todd pressed, not quite teetering into the realm of true hysteria.

He thought he could hear the weight with which Amanda rolled her eyes, but that might just have been the exasperated sigh that generally accompanied the act.

“Look, Todd, I’m not trying to like, yuck your yum or whatever.”

 _“_ Yuck my yum?” Todd wheezed faintly. He felt like a macaw, trying desperately to communicate but condemned to maneuver exclusively within the strict and largely useless confines of mimicry. He had half an urge to squawk.

“I’m just saying,” Amanda continued breezily, “maybe don’t go waving a ten around. You’ve got a solid seven-point-three with that one, at best.”

“I can’t be having this conversation right now,” Todd moaned. He wasn’t exactly sure when he had closed his eyes, but as he dug his fingers deeper into the central corners of his sockets colors burst like fireworks across a field of darkness.

 _“You_ called _me,_  dude,” Amanda reminded him, amused, with another distant tremolo of her snare.

Todd’s heart rattled against his ribs along the same shuddering rhythm, guilt twisting in a gnarled rope behind his sternum.

“Right,” Todd said, “right. I called you. I - I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Oh you know,” Amanda said, loose and easy, “I’m alright, when I’m not hallucinating terrible shit or whatever.”

Todd winced, guilt digging sharp between his ribs.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, and scrubbed at his face with the hand that still had the lottery ticket clutched therein. He pulled it away as soon as he realized, jamming the ticket awkwardly into his pocket and scrubbing at his face again with his empty palm, hoping with vague queasiness that the blood was dry enough it hadn’t come away on his skin. He searched for an appropriate sentiment and couldn’t muster anything more than another, meager, “Yeah.”

“Hey, it’s all good,” Amanda said, soothing and cheerful. “The meds are mostly working and my bomb ass big brother came to jam with me today, so everything’s cool.”

“Yeah?” Todd said again, and this parrot thing had to stop.

“Totally,” Amanda assured. “He even brought pizza and his cute new hate-crush.”

“Okay, whoa,” Todd laughed. “I think that might be character defamation.”

“I don’t know, it was decent pizza,” Amanda said thoughtfully. Todd rolled his eyes.

“Seriously, there’s not a - a _thing_ with me and Dirk,” he insisted. “He just, I don’t know, imprinted on me. Like a duckling or something.”

“He’s definitely cute enough to pull off the duckling thing,” Amanda agreed, teasing. Todd manfully resisted the desire to lie down in traffic. “For real, though. He seems nice, and like he’s really into you, so try not to do that thing you do, okay?”

“What _thing?_ ” Todd demanded. “I don’t do a _thing._ ”

“You totally do,” Amanda replied, unimpressed. “Whenever you like someone you get super weird and standoffish and kind of mean.”

“I - what?” Todd spluttered. “I’m not _mean!_ ”

“Bro, I say this with love, but you’re kind of King Asshole, sometimes,” Amanda murmured apologetically.

“Okay that’s _definitely_ character defamation,” Todd protested weakly.

“It’s not like, a bad thing!” Amanda huffed. “Or, okay it’s not a _good_ thing, but it kinda works for you. You’re like, an _endearing_ King Asshole. I am too, sometimes! It’s a family trait.”

“Strangely not feeling a whole lot better,” Todd said briskly.

“Whatever, your willowy English boyfriend is clearly into it,” Amanda drawled. “Just be careful not to lay it on too thick, okay? I like this guy and he very obviously likes you. He doesn’t need the full Brotzman experience right up front.”

“Ease him into the craziness?” Todd asked, which was stupid because there was going to be no easing Dirk Gently any further into their orbit than he’d already insinuated himself.

“Exactly.” He could hear Amanda smiling. “Gotta take it slow, really lull him into a false sense of complacency.”

Todd snorted.

“Anyway, bro, I gotta run. I have cold ‘za to kill and TV to binge watch.”

“Sure,” Todd said, scuffing the heel of his much-abused Chuck Taylor against the rain-slicked pavement. “Have fun.”

“Will do,” Amanda assured. “Come up again soon, yeah? And bring Harry Potter with you, I like his style.”

“The first thing, definitely,” Todd agreed. He made a long, low noise of unconvinced consideration. “We’ll see about the second one.” Amanda rewarded him with a laugh as she hung up, the bright glimmer of it cutting off into sharp nothing.

A car passed by, spitting up a muddy tongue of ice-cold water that soaked Todd up to the calves, thoroughly saturating his jeans, socks, and shoes. Todd stared down at his feet for a long moment and then tilted his head back with a long sigh and stared up into the cloud-mottled sky.

“Yeah, that seems right,” he said, resigned, and started squelching ignobly toward the bus stop.

He could probably make it back up to Amanda’s place on Thursday. He had some actual funds now, assuming the lottery people were willing to overlook the bloodied and thoroughly abused state of the ticket to let him cash it in rather than arresting him on suspicion of murder or something. He could probably bring Dirk along too. If things kept progressing as they had been, he wouldn’t be able to shake Dirk even if he tried. Hell, he considered bitterly, he’d probably already swanned his way up to Todd’s thoroughly wrecked apartment and found the door conveniently unlocked and a nine-course dinner magically laid out on the counter.

It was possible, Todd admitted to himself, hunching his shoulders guiltily, that Amanda had been right and he could stand to be a little kinder to the man who seemed to legitimately enjoy his company, even if he had a lingering desperation behind that bright smile and joyous lackadaisy that set Todd’s teeth on edge.

He still wasn’t cute, though. Nope. Definitely not.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
